January 2010
40 posts
Seth Rorabaugh (P-G Empty Netters blog) talks... →
amandaw:
At least not for the long haul. Many in baseball prop up the Athletics or the Twins as evidence of “small market” teams being able to compete, but what exactly have those teams done over the past 10 years besides get to the playoffs and lose to the big spenders from New York or Boston?
…
The salary cap helped fix the NHL. It gives fans in Tampa Bay just as much hope followers in...
How It's Made
…is on the Science Channel nonstop from now until 3am Wednesday.
I’m going to need to keep the heat on in the living room so I can watch Science Channel HD all weekend.
I did it!
amandaw:
See, I tossed together a simple user style: Hide Tumblr Dashboard footer
In Firefox, you can install it with the Stylish extension, or import it to Greasemonkey as a userscript.
It’s fairly simple to get rid of the footer. The sidebar shit, otoh, does not have individual CSS IDs. Only classes. So you can’t hide individual portions of the sidebar unless you hide everything in the...
Howard Zinn dead at 87 →
From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it.
I have about 40 books I’ve bought but...
In all of 2009, I had 101 page views
For Tuesday 1/26, I have already topped 500. Two hours into the day. Thanks to the awesome Dr. Phil Plait.
Has to be the weirdest feeling in the world to see someone whose book you own update their Twitter with a link, to click that link and find yourself at your own blog. Or at least second-weirdest behind (I’m guessing) brain surgery.
So, uh, hello, new people and new followers. I...
South Carolina Lt. Gov. compares poor to 'stray... →
And from the “you fucking have to be kidding me” file:
South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer isn’t backing away from controversial remarks he made over the weekend comparing needy people to “stray animals.” Bauer, who is one of several candidates seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination, said Friday that providing government food assistance to lower-income...
Anti-medicine = anti-woman
So there’s this thing called the Shorty Awards. They’re an interesting little competition in which Twitter users nominate notable Twitter-using people or organizations for awards in certain categories. For example, Adam Savage is leading the Science category, NASA has the top spot in Government and Neil Gaiman is second in, interestingly enough, Customer Service.
There was a bit of...
To distract me from panic-inducing issues
Has this ever happened to you?
You’re in the grocery store, just looking to pick up a couple things you missed the last time. And you’re stuck in the main aisle behind an individual old enough to have a first-edition, autographed Gospel of Mark. He’s not moving particularly quickly and he’s got nothing in his cart.
So you turn down an aisle you don’t need anything...
The latest in infocos →
A poem:
You cut, rip and tear But your brownies never turn out square (Ooh!) And when they’re stuck You’re totally out of luck – Robert Browning.
This classic poem, in addition to being a haunting summation of man’s uncertain feelings about mortality, is also the lead-in to selling The Perfect Brownie Baking Pan.
I believe Joe Posnanski is one of the greatest baseball writers living or...
Oh, Christ
What’s the problem with the NBA today?
If you said “it’s a league for a fundamentally uninteresting sport in which teams score a hundred points per game and in which the final 45 seconds last 30 minutes between intentional fouls and timeouts,” hey, I’m with you.
If, however, you said “there are too many non-whites,” well, you’re probably more in...
The problem with '30 Rock' →
Ezra on unnatural beauty on American television. I’d quote it, but the whole thing is just five sentences long.
WatchOn the eve of the Massachusetts special election, Jon Stewart offers ten minutes of summary of the absurdity seen from every member of the dramatis personæ, particularly the fact that having an 18-seat majority due to one candidate losing an election could sink everything the Democrats have been working for.
It’s not your fault, Democratic Party leadership. No one should have raised the...
I thought "pomegranate" would be the weirdest...
I went to dinner with a friend last night at 99, a northeastern chain with a pretty good and fairly large menu. The menu was even larger last night, owing to an insert featuring some of their latest additions.
Among these additions? The “bubbletini.” It’s number 11 at this link. I had to try it.
And I am happy to report that it smells and tastes exactly like bubble gum. ...
Mile High Caturday →
Cats in stadiums are awesome.
Frustration:
Having something happen during the day that makes you think “I’m going to post about that.”
Remembering, when back at your computer, thinking “I’m going to post about that.”
Being completely unable to recall what “that” was.
A note to drivers in my city
Making a right turn without signaling: annoying, but I roll my eyes and move on.
Waiting until the last second to signal a left turn, so that I’m stuck behind you and can’t move into the right lane to pass you: really fucking annoying, and I’m probably mentally calling you some quite colorful things.
Making a left turn without signaling: what the blueberry fuck are you...
Windows 7 = like
More, perhaps, when I have things installed besides Firefox and Thunderbird.
Priorities, people!
A while back, they opened a Sonic in my hometown(-ish). Since then, it’s all anybody can talk about. They talk about how good it is, they talk about how often they go, they ask me how often I go, they’re shocked when I say I haven’t gone yet, etc.
So, today, I was craving a burger and figured, hell, I might as well, right? I go to Sonic, and sure, it’s decent fast food,...
Current most frustrating thing about tumblr
The annoying bug where one’s dashboard decides the X most recent posts were not made and thus doesn’t display them, but then nearly immediately updates the page title to “(X) Tumblr” to indicate that those posts exist. And then one refreshes, and it still doesn’t display them. But it nearly immediately updates the title to “(X) Tumblr” to indicate…
Met 'mob' contracts →
The link goes to the New York Post. I don’t blame you if you don’t wish to click it.
The Mets shelled out $51.6 million in taxpayer money to contractors shunned by the city for their ties to the Mafia, labor corruption or bribery, The Post has learned.
Of course they did. After all, Jeff Wilpon let Bernie Madoff have enough cash that, when it all settled, Wilpon made $48 million...
Smile! You've got cancer →
I was going to write something more detailed about this, but it’s too long and too good for me to do it any justice. Instead, I’ll just exhort you to read it, read it, read it.
Choice quotes if you need more convincing:
I received a few words of encouragement in my fight with the insurance company, which had taken the position that my biopsy was a kind of optional indulgence, but...
Apparently, there used to be an NHL team called the Quebec Nordiques. Right up until 1995.
I can honestly say I have never heard that team name before.